James Glassman, the executive director of the George W. Bush Institute and a Forbes contributor, has written a piece on the facts about budget deficits and how various presidents truly rank.

The inspiration for Glassman’s piece was a comment by former Governor Howard Dean, who was asked what specific policies in the Bush administration he thinks are still being used to explain an unemployment rate of more than eight percent. To which Dean responded, “The biggest ones are the deficits that were run up…. The deficits were enormous.”

All of which caused Glassman to do something that Dean did not: consult the facts in various economic reports. Here is the key paragraph:

As for spending itself, during the George W. Bush years (2001-08), federal outlays averaged 19.6 percent of GDP, a little less than during the Clinton years (1993-2000), at 19.8 percent and far below Reagan, whose outlays never dropped below 21 percent of GDP in any year and averaged 22.4 percent. Even factoring in the TARP year (2009), Bush’s average outlays as a proportion of the economy was 20.3 percent – far below Reagan and only a half-point below Clinton. As for Obama, even excluding 2009, his spending has averaged 24.1 percent of GDP – the highest level for any three years since World War II.